Just in Case: Trepidations and Travel

Everyone travels differently. My friend, Sarah, is afraid to travel by plane, train, or boat – so she is relegated to traveling to wherever the car can take her. My mom has trouble driving, so a trip with her at the wheel wouldn’t be a great idea.

You might look at me and think I have no fear of travel, and you’d be right – for the most part. My boundaries are typically no third-world nations, as low on the terrorist scale as I can get, and places where they speak English. I’m not averse to going to other European countries (I’ve been to several).  It’s just that England seems to have what interests me most.

I am an organizer. I have certification in event planning and am a senior level Toastmaster (they are keen on leadership and management skills). I love planning a trip down to the nth detail – knowing that something will always tip the “bulletproof” meter at some point. You have to be adaptable when you travel.

When I think about my planning and organization skills, I can tell you that what drives them is a fear of forgetfulness. I’m pushing 60 at this point, and the women in my family aren’t known for their sharp memory. I put everything down just in case. When I say I put everything down, I mean to say that I create a trip book with a calendar, places, dates, phone numbers, checklists, confirmations, and tickets. This book (both hardcopy and softcopy) travels with me. I even upload it to Google Drive… just in case.

I write out in great detail all the bits I want my petsitter to know while I’m gone. How Maddie likes to chase the ball and won’t hardly eat and how Polly will gobble like a starving maniac and pay little attention to playing ball (unless Maddie does). Then, she’ll steal the darn thing.

If someone is watching my house, they need to know when the garbage pickup is and what the alarm code is and which lights to turn off and on. It’s a bit daunting all the buttons I have to press before I feel comfortable leaving home for other parts of the universe.

Then, comes the day of the trip. The alarm goes off, I shower, lock up the house, and it’s bon voyage ME! I typically leave my car at surface parking somewhere at the airport, lock the doors, board the shuttle, and that – my friends – is when two things happen:

1. Extreme joy and happiness to be going on the trip I’d planned for all year.
2. Extreme fear that something is going to go wrong.

In case something might happen on my way to the airport or if the ticket lines are long, I leave very early. This usually means that I arrive with a couple of hours to sit and relax before my flight. To ease into vacation, I sometimes get a chair massage while waiting. This helps calms my nerves because I’m all the while thinking about how much I’ll miss my dogs and my house and all my friends and family. I start getting a pit in my stomach about it, and the whole trip which was everso exciting to plan is now just a few hours to execution.

It was at about this time one year that my alarm system went off, and the company called me. I was in Houston minutes from boarding a flight. My house sitter hadn't fully shut the front door, and didn't have her cell phone with her. I was frantically dialing neighbors and trying to get my pets checked on. When I could finally do no more, I shut off the phone and boarded my plane. Sometimes, you just have to do the hard things.

Some folks swear by traveling spontaneously, and while flying by the seat of my pants may sometimes have its charm, it’s definitely not in my personality to plan my whole trip that way. Planning helps alleviate a lot of the stress I might feel otherwise about traveling and it also becomes a part of the trip itself – giving me months of joy at planning the adventure.

But when push comes to shove, and it’s all about me getting on that plane, I take a deep breath and grab the dream with both hands… knowing that I have Xanax in the carry on.

Just in case!